Exit interviews do nothing

Inspired by this article on The Onion (a satire newspaper and website), I wanted to share with you my thoughts on exit interviews.

The purpose of the exit interview is two fold (one obvious, one not so obvious):

1. To gather data from departing employees on working conditions to improve retention

2. To attempt to protect from litigation.

The first one is obvious but probably unnecessary. If you are a company that really cares about retention so much that you consult your employees, you probably already have an idea why they are leaving and what working conditions are like. An exit interview is unlikely to reveal anything.

If you are a company that doesn’t know enough about what working conditions are like and why employees leave, it is unlikely that you’ll ask the right questions or apply the answers in any meaningful way. There are exceptions to both of these but you get the idea.

Now the idea of litigation avoidance is sort of silly to me. I laughed out loud in a classroom setting when I heard this one. If you haven’t buttoned up possible litigation gaps in your company before you get to an employee exit, an exit interview will do zero good. Granted an exit interview is court admissable in most cases, it is usually considered weak evidence (as the situation of an exit interview is taken into consideration, it makes sense). If everything else in your employee file says you were miserable because of your boss and an exit interview says you gave the boss a 3 out of 5, that doesn’t mean much. Companies that do a great job of resolving legalities and work situations immediately have nothing to flush out at the end of a career at that company. The few times it does come around, it is unlikely an exit interview would do anything. You still have to have solid documentation throughout.

If you’re a good company in the employee relations side, an exit interview isn’t going to reveal much and it isn’t going to add much litigation protection. If you’re a crappy company, an exit interview is at best a stop gap solution to a much bigger problem in your organization. Focusing efforts on improving the exit interview would be better spent on focusing efforts on preventing the exit interview from being called in the first place.

Tagged as: exit interviews, litigation avoidance, useless hr tools, worthless exit interviews